Most books are sold by pretending everyone should buy them. I would rather tell you upfront who this one is not for. If any of the sections below describe you, save your twenty-four dollars and ninety-nine cents and go read something else. I mean that.

Founder Fallout is a hundred-question workbook about partnership equity. It came out of four partnerships I have lived through, two of which were ambushes I did not see coming, and a decade of watching other founders sign paperwork they had not read. If you are already past the parts of business where partnership equity matters, or you are looking for something different than what this book delivers, keep scrolling. The right answer for you is not always yes.

If you have never started a business and are not planning to start one

This is not a business-inspiration book. It is not a how-to-quit-your-job book. It will not tell you why entrepreneurship is beautiful. It will tell you what to ask before you sign a partnership agreement, and what to do when a partner leaves, dies, gets divorced, gets sued, or turns on you. If you are five years away from that world, you do not need this book yet. Come back when you have a real deal in front of you.

The book I am writing next, Don't Quit Your Day Job Yet, is closer to what you are looking for. That one is the hundred questions you should be able to answer before you even start a new business. Do not quit your day job until your new business does not notice your paycheck. That book will exist eventually. This one will not solve that problem.

If you are a solo founder and you plan to stay solo

Founder Fallout is a partnership book. Every chapter is written for the founder who has, or will have, at least one other name on the corporate paperwork. Equity partners, co-founders, minority owners, silent partners, family shareholders. If you are the only owner of your company and you intend to stay that way forever, most of this book will not apply to you.

There are still two or three chapters you would find useful, on advisor equity and on employee option grants, but the other ninety-seven questions are not aimed at you. Buy something else. Save the money.

If you are looking for a motivational or feel-good book

I do not write to make you feel better. I write to make you ask the right question before you sign the wrong paper. There are chapters in Founder Fallout about betrayal, about paying legal fees you cannot afford, about the moment you realize your partner has been planning your exit for six months while you were building product. None of that is uplifting. It is not designed to be.

If you are looking for a book that will get you fired up for Monday morning, this is the wrong book. Read Ryan Holiday. Read David Goggins. Read Simon Sinek. Those are all excellent writers. That is not what I do here.

If you are already through your first partnership dispute and it ended clean

Some founders have done one partnership deal, had one partner leave, and it went well. Everyone signed everything, everyone walked away with what they were owed, nobody sued anyone, everybody still gets a Christmas card. If that is you, you probably already know most of what is in this book by instinct. You might still find a few chapters useful for the next deal. You might not.

I still think you would enjoy the read, but I will not oversell it. The book is priced fairly for someone who is about to walk into their first real partnership. It is not priced for someone who has already learned this by living it.

If you refuse to write anything down

The whole book is a workbook. There is space to write in it. There are questions that require you to actually draft an answer, hand it to your prospective partner, and compare what they wrote to what you wrote. If you are the kind of founder who runs everything from memory and refuses to put anything on paper, the book will feel like homework you did not sign up for.

I built it that way on purpose. The most expensive mistakes I have made in partnership deals were things I understood in my head but never wrote down and never asked my partner to write down either. If you will not do that part, you will not get the value out of the book.

If you want a lawyer's opinion

I am not a lawyer. Founder Fallout is not legal advice. It is a founder's playbook, written from what I have lived and what I have watched other founders live. Every hard chapter ends with a note that says talk to your lawyer, then use these questions to prepare for that conversation. The book makes your legal fees cheaper because you show up prepared, not because it replaces the lawyer.

If you are looking for a book that is a substitute for a real corporate attorney, that book does not exist and nobody honest is selling it. Go pay a lawyer.

If you were expecting a tech-founder book

I am not a tech founder. Murphy Door is a manufacturing company. We make physical hidden doors and hand-built ladders in three American plants. My other companies are in real estate, hospitality, and consumer products. The examples in Founder Fallout come from those worlds.

Almost every principle in the book applies to a software company too, because equity is equity and betrayal is betrayal. But if you were expecting Silicon Valley cap tables, term sheets, and Series A vesting cliffs, that is not the flavor of the book. Read Venture Deals by Brad Feld for that. It is excellent.

Who Founder Fallout is for

If you scrolled this far and none of those disqualifiers hit, you are probably the right reader. This book was written for the founder who is either about to sign a partnership agreement, is inside a partnership right now and can feel something is off, or has just been ambushed and is trying to make sense of what happened. It was also written for the operator who has been quietly promoted into an equity conversation with their boss and does not want to walk in blind.

If that is you, [read the FAQ next](../faq) to see what the book covers, then [buy it here for twenty-four dollars and ninety-nine cents](../index#book) direct, or on Amazon in paperback or Kindle.

Buy Founder Fallout

  • [Buy the book direct on jeremybarker.com for $24.99](../index#book)
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  • [Buy the Kindle edition on Amazon](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FTKL5CY9)

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  • [Get The First Five Questions from Founder Fallout as a free PDF](../index#droplist) when you join the drop list.